This collection of interdisciplinary essays seeks to place Ireland within the Northern Renaissance both in terms of the development of Gaelic and Gaelicised courts prior to the Tudor conquest and by examining the role of the Tudor court in the political culture of late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ireland. Ireland and the Renaissance court continues the recent historiographical approach of situating Ireland as part of Europe rather than an isolated backwater, but takes a wider approach than some prior publications by arguing that the dynamics and features of a Renaissance court existed in Ireland prior to the Tudor conquest, and examines the ways in which the Elizabethan court both informed politics and manifested as a viceregal court in Ireland. The focus on Renaissance court culture does mean that the impacts of the Reformations are excluded from the analyses within the chapters. The book is divided into three sections: ‘Part I: Indigenous court society in Ireland,’ ‘Part II: Made in Whitehall: Irish policy and a regnal court,’ and ‘Part III: Positioning Ireland in the Renaissance court world.’ The chapters in each section are connected by general topic and, in the case of part I, by methodology.

The chapters in part I rely primarily on literary sources, such as Irish bardic poetry, to demonstrate that the local Irish lordships were developing Renaissance-style courts similar to those in other regions lacking a strong central state. Micheál Hoyne uses Irish ‘bardic’ honour-poetry to place the developing Gaelic and Gaelicised cúirt in the context of the developing Renaissance court. Hoyne focuses on texts produced between 1400 and 1650, the age of the ‘tower-house’. His analysis of descriptions of exceptional levels of generosity to establish a ‘base-line’ expectation for the Gaelic and Gaelicised lordship is insightful, though it does lean a little heavily on supposition at times. Gearóidin de Buitléir’s examination of Tomás Dubh de Buitléir – ‘Black Tom,’ the 10th earl of Ormond, similarly begins with a bardic poem celebrating the earl’s house with elaborate descriptions of armed soldiers juxtaposed with more courtly behavior. The strength of this micro-history in demonstrating the connections between Ireland and the wider world of the Northern Renaissance rests on the numerous ways in which de Buitléir shows that Ormond typified the culture of the Renaissance court. It is worth noting, however, that, as de Buitléir acknowledges, Black Tom was one of Queen Elizabeth’s favourites, and the Butlers of Ormond had long been associated with the royal court in London, especially during the period of the Tudor conquest, perhaps challenging the use of Ormond as an exemplar. Perhaps the most innovative of the chapters in part I is that by Jason Harris. Harris points to the use of specific script and terms typical of Renaissance Latinity by Irish writers to argue that Renaissance intellectual culture, at the very least, arrived in Ireland before the Tudors.

The chapters in part II examine the ways in which the court of Elizabeth I debated and established Irish policy and thus influenced politics and the Dublin court in Ireland. The first three chapters in this section essentially address the same topic, but from varied angles and perspectives, giving the resulting, overarching discourse on the debates and development of Elizabethan Irish policy greater nuance. Perhaps one of the most interesting subtopics present in the chapters by David Heffernan, Nicholas Popper and Christopher Maginn is the production and dissemination of knowledge in the Elizabethan court. Popper’s analysis of the clerk of the council, Robert Beale’s expertise as based entirely on ‘State of’ treatises, while Beale himself never set foot in Ireland, is a fascinating and well-argued account not just of the ways in which Irish policy was formed under Elizabeth but the ways in which knowledge and expertise were created in the Elizabethan court between 1558 and 1580. Both Heffernan and Maginn touch on this phenomenon in their own chapters: Heffernan discusses Beale and references Popper’s chapter directly. In subtle contrast, David Edwards argues for the importance of personal experience in the development of Irish policy after 1583 through the lens of Sir James Croft’s A discourse for the Reformacon of Irland (1583). Despite the fact that Croft, who had previously served as lord lieutenant of Ireland from 1551–2, failed to secure re-appointment to the governorship of Ireland, which was awarded to Sir John Perrot in 1584, Elizabeth’s instructions to Perrot as to how he should govern Ireland as her viceroy echoed many of the recommendations included in Beale’s Discourse, indicating that experience remained important in constructing the knowledge upon which the queen based her policies toward Ireland.

Simon Egan’s chapter, ‘Our men in Scotland: the Gaelic-Irish nobility and the Scottish Renaissance court, c.1400–c.1660’, opens part III. Egan provides a detailed analysis of the long-standing connections between the Stewart court in Edinburgh and the O’Donnells of Tyrconnell within the context of complex dynamics of Scottish politics during the reigns of James IV and James VI. A deeper analysis of the reign of James V would have strengthened Egan’s argument, especially given the Scottish monarch’s connections to both Charles V and the papacy in the 1530s. R. Malcolm Smuts’s examination of the itinerant nature of the viceregal court in Ireland offers a new model for analysing the movements of the various lords deputy and lieutenant during the Tudor conquest. His criticisms of the viceregal Irish court’s failure to assimilate indigenous aristocracy vis-à-vis the Iberian model seem to overlook the English ideological implications of the 1399 statutes of Kilkenny, which were intended to suppress and ultimately eliminate Gaelic cultural influences and the Gaelicisation of the Old English nobility. These were re-affirmed in 1537. Smuts argues that had the various viceroys attempted to incorporate the Gaelic aristocracy, or assimilated aspects of Gaelic culture into the viceregal court culture, they might have been more successful in drawing the Gaelic and Gaelicised aristocracy into English-European courtly traditions. However, this was clearly not an option given their efforts to suppress that very culture.

Overall, the chapters in Ireland and the Renaissance court accomplish exactly what Edwards and Kane compiled them to do: begin to address the dearth of Renaissance analyses of early-sixteenth-century Ireland; demonstrate the potential for an interdisciplinary approach to Irish history; and, more importantly, open the doors for further research in this area. The book provides an innovative and nuanced approach to a neglected aspect of Irish historical research and is certain to inspire further analyses of early modern Ireland’s place in the Northern Renaissance.